THE NINETEENTH CENTURY GERMAN LIED

The development of the piano, together with changes in culture and society, led to the transformation of song into a major musical genre. This study of the great lieder of 19th-century composers Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and Hugo Wolf also includes lesser-known composers, such as Louis Spohr and Robert Franz, plus significant contributions from women composers and performers.

German Lieder in the Nineteenth-Century provides a detailed introduction to the German lied. Beginning with its origin in the literary and musical culture of Germany in the nineteenth-century, the book covers individual composers, including Shubert, Schumann, Brahms, Strauss, Mahler and Wolf, the literary sources of lieder, the historical and conceptual issues of song cycles, and issues of musical technique and style in performance practice. Written by eminent music scholars in the field, each chapter includes detailed musical examples and analysis. The second edition has been revised and updated to include the most recent research of each composer and additional musical examples.

The German lied, or art song, is considered one of the most intimate of all musical genres—often focused on the poetic speaker's inner world and best suited for private and semi-private performance in the home or salon. Yet, problematically, any sense of inwardness in lieder depends on outward expression through performance. With this paradox at its heart, Intimacy, Performance, and the Lied in the Early Nineteenth Century explores the relationships between early nineteenth-century theories of the inward self, the performance practices surrounding inward lyric poetry and song, and the larger conventions determining the place of intimate poetry and song in the public concert hall. Jennifer Ronyak studies the cultural practices surrounding lieder performances in northern and central Germany in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, demonstrating how presentations of lieder during the formative years of the genre put pressure on their sense of interiority. She examines how musicians responded to public concern that outward expression would leave the interiority of the poet, the song, or the performer unguarded and susceptible to danger. Through this rich performative paradox Ronyak reveals how a song maintains its powerful intimacy even during its inherently public performance.

This book bridges a gap in existing scholarship by foregrounding the contribution of women to the nineteenth-century Lied. Building on the pioneering work of scholars in recent years, it consolidates recent research on women’s achievements in the genre, and develops an alternative narrative of the Lied that embraces an understanding of the contributions of women, and of the contexts of their engagement with German song and related genres. Lieder composers including Fanny Hensel, Clara Schumann, Pauline Viardot-Garcia and Josephine Lang are considered with a stimulating variety of analytical approaches. In addition to the focus on composers associated with history and theory of the Lied, the various chapters explore the cultural and sociological background to the Lied’s musical environment, as well as engaging with gender studies and discussing performance and pedagogical contexts. The range of subject matter reflects the interdisciplinary nature of current research in the field, and the energy it generates among scholars and performers. Women and the Nineteenth-Century Lied aims to widen readers’ perception of the genre and help promote awareness of women’s contribution to nineteenth-century musical life through critical appraisal of the cultural context of the Lied, encouraging acquaintance with the voices of women composers, and the variety of their contributions to the repertoire.

Qualities of motion and emotion in song come from poetic images, melody, harmony, and voice leading, but they also come from rhythm and meter-the flow and articulation of words and music in time. This book explores rhythm and meter in the nineteenth-century German Lied, including songs for voice and piano by Fanny Hensel née Mendelssohn, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, and Hugo Wolf. The Lied, as a genre, is characterized especially by the fusion of poetry and music. Poetic meter itself has expressive qualities, and rhythmic variations contribute further to the modes of signification. These features often carry over into songs, even as they are set in the more strictly determined periodicities of musical meter. A new method of declamatory-schema analysis is presented to illustrate common possibilities for setting trimeter, tetrameter, and pentameter lines. Degrees of rhythmic regularity and irregularity are also considered. There has been a wealth of new work on metric theory and analysis in the past thirty years; here this research is reviewed and applied in song analysis. Topics include the nature of metric entrainment (drawing on music psychology), metric dissonance, hypermeter, and phrase rhythm. Whereas narrative accounts of the nineteenth-century Lied typically begin with Schubert, here forms of expansion and elision in songs by Hensel provide a point of departure. Repetition links up directly with motion in songs by Schubert, including his famous "Gretchen am Spinnrade." The doubling and reverberation of vocal melody creates a form of interiorized resonance in Schumann's songs. Brahms and Wolf are typically understood as polar opposites in the later nineteenth century; here the differences are clarified along with deeper affinities. Songs by both Brahms and Wolf may be understood as musical performances of poetic readings, and in this regard they both belong to a late period of cultural history.

A singer in an evening dress, a grand piano. A modest-sized audience, mostly well-dressed and silver-haired, equipped with translation booklets. A program consisting entirely of songs by one or two composers. This is the way of the Lieder recital these days. While it might seem that this style of performance is a long-standing tradition, German Song Onstage demonstrates that it is not. For much of the 19th century, the songs of Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms were heard in the home, salon, and, no less significantly, on the concert platform alongside orchestral and choral works. A dedicated program was rare, a dedicated audience even more so. The Lied was a genre with both more private and more public associations than is commonly recalled. The contributors to this volume explore a broad range of venues, singers, and audiences in distinct places and time periods—including the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, and Germany—from the mid-19th century through the early 20th century. These historical case studies are set alongside reflections from a selection of today's leading musicians, offering insights on current Lied practices that will inform future generations of performers, scholars, and connoisseurs. Together these case studies unsettle narrow and elitist assumptions about what it meant and still means to present German song onstage by providing a transnational picture of historical Lieder performance, and opening up discussions about the relationship between history and performance today.